LinkedIn continues to add new tools and features, improving the user-experience in tiny increments, as opposed to adding in wide-scale changes. The latest addition comes in the form of multi-image posting. [Source: Social Media Today]

Instagram started sharing analytics for brands’ organic posts and Stories through the Instagram Platform API, so that brands can pull up these stats within the marketing dashboards they use to manage and monitor their various social accounts. [Source: MARTECH TODAY]

Google has been testing a carousel format for these Sitelinks for over a year and today has confirmed they are now rolling out the new carousel-based design for mobile search results. [Source: Search Engine Land]

Google is now testing a list format for enhanced sitelinks. The link font is smaller, but taken together, the list of four enhanced sitelinks takes up more real estate than the column format. [Source: Search Engine Land]

Over on the YouTube Help forum, the platform has announced that publishers will now be able to have comments with links or hashtags included within them to be held for review. [Source: Social Media Today]

Google has confirmed that they are running a small experiment where they auto-play videos in the search results page. When you do a search for some movies (and possibly television shows), Google will begin autoplaying a video in the right hand sidebar, appearing within the knowledge panel. [Source: Search Engine Land]

Expert Opinion:

1. Make the most out of your marketing budgets with cross-device marketing.

Cross-device targeting is the practice to identify and deliver ads to a specific set of audience across various devices they use. Cross-device marketing is a very effective approach that marketers can use to reach the correct audience and achieve the desired results from their campaigns. Combined with device graphs, marketing professionals can correctly identify various consumer devices to connect with and measure every interaction. Combining the data from different customers across different devices, marketers can plan the campaigns efficiently and achieve positive returns on the ad spends.

Cross-device marketing can help marketers to:

– Deliver personalised content and provide delightful experience

– Accurately target the audience and reduce wasted ad spends

– Optimise business results with correct attribution

Mastering cross-device data and managing campaigns using this data can be a game changer for making the most out of the marketing budgets. Also, with the understanding of cross-device identity, marketers can be future ready with the introduction of new devices which will open up more opportunities to target the customers in different ways.

According to IHS, there were around 15.4 billion connected devices in 2015, and this number is projected to go up to 30.7 billion by 2020, ranging from watches to TVs to cars to home appliances. Each of these devices is an opportunity for the marketers to interact with the consumers digitally and gain possible conversions for their activities.